I'm torn, as usual. My favorite whipping post is "Bless her heart", a common
insult from my neck of the woods. Being the dork that I am, I often miss the insults
leveled my way. In many cases, the intention isn't to be rude but to poke fun in a
socially constructive way.
To avoid focusing on the irony behind Nick's cartoon, I'll focus on a middle
class shopper avoiding small, specific shops like butchers or tire shops and
instead buying all their goods at Walmart (or Amazon). In order to really grok
the moral of that condition, one has to unwind a LOT of tightly wound
experiences. My inability to recognize when someone's making fun of me (either
in a good- or ill-natured way) seems to have something to do with task
switching.
It's always seemed to me the UK parliamentary "debates" involved more deeply
layered rhetoric than our own punctuated discourse in Congress. My hypothesis here is: a
facility with task switching allows one to parse those layers (seemingly) simultaneously.
(To be clear, there is no such thing as multi-tasking. It's simulated through fast and
fluid interleaving.)
Courtesy and civility can only be achieved by those who are capable of leveling criticism
*within* the coarser layers of protocol. The rise of the "autism spectrum" in
folk psychology is either causal *or* mostly a kind of laziness/efficiency/pragmatism ...
a lack of facility for task switching.
A friend of mine is fond of saying "being poor is difficult" to indicate this
generalized problem. Only relatively wealthy people have the resources to buy bread at
the bakery, meat at the butcher, etc. The rest of us are so stressed and resource-poor
(whether attention or whatever) that we *must* shop at Walmart or Amazon because we have
no other option. We have to shave off every tiny bit of waste we can find just to stay
sane (or survive).
And the ultra-wealthy *know* this. They spam us with bullshit (X/Twitter/LLMs),
surround our cities with below-cost box stores to destroy businesses, destroy
unions, lobby legislators up and down the spectrum, etc. They do this because
they *know* we're resource poor. And we're approaching the point where none of
us can afford to be courteous ... or at least we don't think we can afford it
because our values and priorities have been so bent by the forcing structure
they've trapped us in.
What to do? ... What to do.
On 3/18/25 10:25 AM, Santafe wrote:
Your second link is a good read, Glen, and Olberding looks a bit interesting
from her homepage.
In particular, her concern with courtesy as a functional and
intentionally-maintained public good,
logo-fb-cbabd21f2fe6fcea8fc92abf268d5a4f1a9be2e0736375b2df5995bbf17915fe.png
Amy Olberding (University of Oklahoma)
<https://philpeople.org/profiles/amy-olberding?app=%22%3EAna>
philpeople.org <https://philpeople.org/profiles/amy-olberding?app=%22%3EAna>
<https://philpeople.org/profiles/amy-olberding?app=%22%3EAna>
and her connection of it as one of the pillars of Confucianism, is one I have
wanted to see made in scholarly work for a while.
Thanks for these,
Eric
On Mar 18, 2025, at 9:53, glen <[email protected]> wrote:
Irony is dead. That some of us literally put money into Sam Altman's bank
account by generating completely useless cartoons lamely attempting to
criticize Altman's friend Trump [⛤] is ... what? ... what is that? Hypocrisy?
Stupidity? Suicide?
I don't have the words. [⛧] It's tantamount to the Leopards Ate My Face (LAMF)
meme. The latest is of course liberals snacking on scenes of Trump voters
regretting their vote (Vets losing their jobs, wives being deported, threats to
SSA, etc.). But the source of the meme is as old as time. People don't vote in
their best interests, with their dollar or at the ballot box. And people who
use GPT to generate political cartoons from which the target of the cartoons
profit is canonical.
I suppose you just can't stop people from shooting themselves in the foot.
C'est la vie.
[⛤]
https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-hopes-donald-trump-build-new-ai-infrastructure-2025-1
[⛧] For those of us who try to find words wherever we can, this may be interesting:
https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2famysshadowbook.blogspot.com%2f2025%2f03%2fary-word.html&c=E,1,uf1PjNhQGYXt6eApisb5X8V3pACkTw2342Td_Sy3RRgsO3N7CpoBTd9582L_-lZ5y2WPmFC90kbBH_FAb8qfz7fXREyIo6K5khWzn2D7&typo=1
On 3/17/25 5:30 PM, steve smith wrote:
Nick:
As you may know already, we are peas in a pod. I remind everyone here gently from
time to time in various ways to use their <delete> keys with my missives of
questionable merit.
As I age (grow more wise, more complex, more ??) I recognize that my ideations (too much
encouraged/supplemented these days by my bar friend GPT) are perhaps "all over the
place" relative to other's sensibilities.
When I saw your (and George's) cartoon, I had a sense of "I guess I had to be there",
which is why I offered you my parsing.... even though we all know that "a joke should never be
explained"...
I also know (from bits of feedback from various quarters) that fractions of my
nonsense are parsed and appreciated but not (publicly) acknowledged. I think
you should continue (as you do) to share what you might, as you must... even
to deafening silence?
:Steve
Steve, and others,
Thanks for taking the meme idea seriously for a moment. I have these moments
of giddiness in which an idea just seems so good that the world must have it.
I actually imagined that my inbox would be full of copies of my own cartoon
sent to me by people who did not know its source. Crazy as a loon, I know it,
but they are wonderful moments, and I could not write [live?] without them.
Narcissism Unbounded. Thanks for playing along.
Nick
On Sun, Mar 16, 2025 at 3:18 PM steve smith <[email protected]> wrote:
It seems to me they haven’t this through so good. Thousands of NIH, NSF, and
DOE funded scientists out on the international market. Add to that reduced
regulation on advanced scientific equipment and services. Augment with a
general sense of doom and self-interest and alienation from their country of
origin. Sounds like a recipe for foreign-based companies to scoop them up, if
not other governments. I won’t suggest particulars, but I think it is obvious
how this could result in bad outcomes.
My molecular biologist daughter is in the breach/sights of this nonsense. She
dedicated her career to 3rd-world focused virology (flavi like West Nile, Dingue, Zika)
and is now faced with the triple-whammy of reduced funding/interest in third-world
problems, reduced *health* funding, and the spirit that suggests as a woman in science
she might somehow have gotten her funding through DEI biases. She is not a candidate
for "defecting" to China or Russia in this context but has been made crazy by
watching her mid-career colleagues defect from academic research to profit-focused big
pharma. She got pulled off Flavi's to chase Coronas for a year or more because her
institution had more funding than they could spend and her funding was a little more
fungible... I think she can (probably) hang in there through the current storm (years)
but not clear and it might actually be better for her (career) to move to a European
Institution (though I don't know if that is
even possible given what EricS suggested about demand/supply.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, I participated in a brief project
reviewing US State Dept proposals by (former) Soviet scientists seeking an
alternative to becomeing rogue nuclear scientists for who knows? Seems like
we are about to have our own problem of that nature?
--
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¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
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